Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.

> There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample

I think these numbers are off. Where are you getting that from? Is there raw data somewhere?

I counted the people on the page and see 39 very conservative and 47 very liberal (not 26).

I did not check the other numbers. But with that its 78 liberals which is 43%. And the total liberals + conservatives are 180. So I dont think the total participant number is 180 - thats just the total of liberals and conservatives.

And if its a 56/43 (~1.3) split for conservatives that seems to actually udnerrepresent conservatives compared to the general population without moderates. Where we see a 36/25 (1.44) conservative/liberal split in terms of ideology, not voter registration, which I think aligns more closely with the "political views" label.

>The way Americans identify themselves ideologically was unchanged in 2021, continuing the close division that has persisted in recent years between those describing themselves as either conservative or moderate, while a smaller share identifies as liberal. On average last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and 25% as liberal.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...

Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.

If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.

In percentages, that's 20.5%, 35.3%, 12.6%, 16.3%, 15.3%. Roughly 56% conservatives, 32% liberals.

If I make the window really wide, I see 20 squares in a row and 13 rows, a total of 260 squares. The distribution is now 39, 100, 37, 46, 38.

In percentages, that's 15.0%, 38.4%, 14.2%, 17.7%, 14.6%. Roughly 53% conservatives, 32% liberals.

It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?

Conclusions:

1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.

2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.

Great work... I thought I noticed something similar on the resizing. I guess they prioritized looks over accuracy which is kind of fair although its not obvious why they would have to do it this way.

In any case, it would be good to see the actual data for this stuff.

Thanks for the correction ^^

Reply on news.ycombinator.com